Word: joke
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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When Jupe goes off to Maine to write his novel, things turn awfully serious and seriously awful. An ex-student from one of Jupe's creative-writing classes tracks him down. Jupe had once told the young man that he had talent; as a private joke, he had told everybody in the class the same thing. Now, the student has 15 beer cases full of his handwritten novel and a gun to keep Jupe's attention from wandering. Messages begin to loom at this point. Jupe must be taught that Words Have Meaning; he must experience at first...
...Steve Lawrence, Eydie Gorme, Don Rickles--ya big dummy, ha, ha--and Rose Marie, and I just thought I'd show you some of my best stuff, in a milieu which hardly lent itself to spontaneous creative expression. Surely, if I throw in the rights to that neutron-bomb joke, we can arrange a little something for the column next week? Besides, it's reading period and all, and the kids need something to lift them out of their doldrums...
Sometimes, though, it isn't so easy to joke about racists, and Ed doesn't joke about the subject often with the members of the Phoenix Club who blackballed him in the fall of his sophomore year. Three of Ed's friends quit the club when Ed was not accepted, but Ed wanted to join because he hoped it would give him the opportunity to meet the kind of people who eventually did reject him. The first reason Ed presents to explain why he wasn't admitted is his race. He adds, though, that whenever anything goes wrong, he pins...
...around a little first. He enjoys wrestling because he likes to be in shape--even though, he adds, he isn't really in the best of shape these days, and he's got a lot of friends on the team--real friends, who aren't racists, so they can joke about the fact that Ed adds a little color to the team, and occasionally sneak up to him when he's sitting on the mat and tackle him. When he wrestles, members of the team stand at the edge of the mat and tell him his position...
MOST APPALLING IS the lack of invention. Reiner and Gelbart employ three basic jokes throughout the movie; one, the "God as a funny-rumpled-schlemiel joke," where He talks about the '69 Mets as the last great miracle after the Red Sea; two, the "he'll pop up anywhere" routine, in which Burns will drive by in a cab, control all the stations on a car radio, or appear suddenly in a supermarket aisle (this type of thing has been used from Topper to Bewitched, and was employed to greater comic effect by a steel-jawed villain in this summer...